Design question: why not reuse the CMS slots in mark word?

[Aleksey Shipilev]

On 09/20/2016 02:42 PM, Christine Flood wrote:
> Make sure you don't break object serialization.

I must be missing something. Why do we care about (Java?) object
serialization here?

If forwarding pointer is the part of object metadata (i.e. header), it
does not participate in the serialization at all.

If forwarding pointer is the part of "fields" block, then it is puzzling
how runtime would ever touch it, if it enumerates the fields by offsets,
not reads the entire "bitmap" of fields. (It has to, because field block
is not contiguous due to per-field alignment requirements that are
specific to the current running mode).

Thanks,
-Aleksey